How Good Are You At Framing and Asking Great Questions?

Note: This is a republication of a former article on Etale.org

How good are you at framing and asking questions that inspire, challenge, and drive you and others toward more significant learning and results? This is an art and skill that we can refine over time. Many years ago, when I served as a middle school teacher, it was learning to ask deep, engaging, and intriguing questions that helped me turn a chaotic classroom into one that I and the students looked forward to attending each day. Later, the art of asking questions become the centerpiece of my work as a leader, ethnographic researcher, designer, and consultant. Improving our skill in asking questions can do the same for our learning journeys (formal or informal), our workplace meetings, and almost any learning environment. 

Maybe this is part of why Voltaire wrote, "Judge others by their questions rather than their answers."

Image(s) generated using DALL·E, an AI image-generation tool by OpenAI.

In Make Just One Question, Rothstein and Santana make a compelling case for teaching students to formulate questions across the curriculum. It is often not emphasized in contemporary education if it is not assessed. So what if we assessed question-asking as we sought to grow and learners and help others do the same? Once we ask a question, we can also develop the skills necessary to find and learn more about the answers to these questions. 

• What if we and other learners take responsibility for asking the questions rather than leaving it to a teacher?

• What if we assessed learning by the types of questions that we asked, the nuance, insight, and perspective revealed by a great question?

• As Naguib Mahfouz wrote, "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell if he is wise by his questions." Could learning to ask questions be a means of helping cultivate wisdom?

• What if we encouraged ourselves and others to ask, "What would happen if?

Where do we start? I offer three possibilities.